CHAPTER XXXI.

‘I WOLDE LIVE IN PEES, IF THAT I MIGHT.’

They had been three days at the homely, comfortable hotel at Les Avants, and Madoline was looking all the better for the fresh hillside air, an improvement upon which Mrs. Ferrers expatiated as the latest confirmation of the one all-abiding fact of her own ineffable wisdom. It was one of the loveliest days there had been in all that delicious month of summer weather—passing warm, yet with a gentle west wind that faintly stirred the heavy chestnut leaves, and breathed on Daphne’s cheek, or fluttered round her neck like a caress, scarcely moving the soft lace ruffle round her throat. It was a day on which a white gown seemed the only thing possible in costume, and Daphne and Lina were both dressed in white. It was not by any means the kind of day for climbing or excursionising of any kind, as even that ardent explorer Aunt Rhoda was fain to confess; rather a day on which to wander gently up and down easy paths, or to sit in the pine-woods reading Tennyson or Browning, or adding a few lazy stitches to the last sunflower in hand.

‘You seem to go at your work with a good deal less vigour, Daphne,’ said Edgar, seated at his lady’s feet, on a carpet of fir-needles, his knees drawn up to his chin, clad in light-gray alpaca, and a Panama hat on the back of his head—a cool but not especially becoming costume. Mr. Turchill was not one of those few men who look well in unconventional clothes.

‘The weather is too warm for industry.’

‘I’m afraid those curtains will never be finished.’

‘Oh yes, they will!’ said Daphne, ‘I mean to persevere. I may be a very old woman by the time they are done, but I am not going to give in. Lina says my life is a thing of shreds and patches. I will show her that I am not to be daunted by the stupendousness of a task. Three hundred and fifty-one and a quarter sunflowers still to be done. Doesn’t it rather remind you of that type of the everlasting—a rock against which a bird scrapes its beak once in a thousand years, and when the bird has worn away the whole rock, time will come to an end? Please go on with “Luria,” and try to be a little more dramatic and a little less monotonous.’

‘I am a wretched reader,’ said Edgar apologetically, as he looked for his place; ‘but I think I might read a shade better if I understood what I was reading. Browning is rather obscure.’

‘I’m afraid you have not a poetic mind. You didn’t seem to understand much of “Atalanta in Calydon,” which you so kindly read to us yesterday.’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t,’ confessed the Squire of Hawksyard, with praiseworthy meekness. ‘Modern poetry is rather difficult. I can always understand Shakespeare, and Pope, and Crabbe, and Byron, but I own that even Wordsworth is beyond me. His meaning is pretty clear, but I can’t discover his beauties.’

‘Simply because your intellectual growth was allowed to stop when you left Rugby. But I insist upon you learning to appreciate Tennyson and Browning; so please go on with “Luria.”’

‘In my opinion, Daphne,’ remarked Aunt Rhoda, with an oracular air, ‘it would have been much better for the balance of your mind if you had read a great deal more prose and a great deal less poetry. Good solid reading of a thoroughly useful kind would have taught you to think properly, and to express yourself carefully, instead of perpetually startling people by giving utterance to the wildest ideas.’

‘I think I speak as the birds sing,’ answered Daphne, ‘because I can’t help it.’

‘The habit of sober thought is a valuable one, which I hope you will acquire by-and-by, when you are mistress of a household; or else I am sorry for your future husband.’

‘Please don’t be sorry for me, Mrs. Ferrers,’ protested Edgar, reddening angrily, as he always did at any slight to Daphne; ‘I am so perfectly contented with my fate that it would be a waste of power to pity me.’

‘It is early days yet,’ sighed Aunt Rhoda. ‘But I live in the hope that Daphne will steady and tone down before she becomes a wife.’

‘If you don’t begin to read this instant,’ whispered Daphne, with her rosy lips close to Edgar’s ear, ‘I shall be made the text of one of Aunt Rhoda’s homilies.’

Edgar took the hint, and plunged anyhow and anywhere into the pages of Browning.

They lived all day in the woods, taking their luncheon picnic fashion under the pine-trees. The two young men catered, and fetched and carried for them, assisted by Mowser. They brought cold fowls, and sliced Strasbourg ham, and salad, fruit and cake, a bottle of Bordeaux, and another of a Swiss white wine, which was rather like a weak imitation of Devonshire perry. But such a meal, spread upon a snow-white tablecloth under pine-trees, over whose dark feathery tops gleam the blue bright summer heaven, is about the most enjoyable banquet possible for youthful revellers. Even Aunt Rhoda admitted that it was an agreeable change from the home comforts of Arden Rectory.

‘I hope my dear Rector is being taken care of,’ she murmured plaintively, when she had dulled the edge of an appetite sharpened by that clear air.

‘I hope you will all do justice to the chickens,’ said Gerald, looking across at Daphne, who sat by Edgar’s side in a thoroughly Darby and Joanish manner. ‘I remember once being at a picnic in a forest where an elderly fowl was made quite a feature of. My hostess fancied I was desperately hungry, and was quite distressed at my avoidance of the ancient bird.’

Daphne’s eyes were on her plate, but a slow smile crept over her face in spite of herself. She and Gerald had scarcely looked at each other in all those days among the pine-trees. They had lived in daily intercourse, and yet contrived to dwell as completely apart as if the lake had flowed between them; as if he, like St. Preux, had gazed across the blue waters to catch the glimmer of his beloved’s casement, and she, like Julie, had pined in the home that was desolate without love’s fatal presence. It was hardly possible for resolve to have been firmer than Daphne’s had been since that night at Fribourg. It was hardly possible for an honest purpose to have been more honestly fulfilled.

Mowser, waiting upon the picnickers, saw that significant look of Gerald’s, and Daphne’s answering smile; just as she had seen many things at South Hill and elsewhere which only her observant eyes had noted.

‘Still at your old tricks, my young lady,’ she said to herself; ‘but Jane Mowser has got an eye upon you, and your mockinventions shan’t succeed, if Mowser’s faithful service can circum-prevent you.’

After luncheon they all sat idly looking down at the distant lake, lying so far beneath their feet, like a pool of blue water in the hollow of the hills, or wandered a little here and there, searching out higher points from which to look down at the lake, or across to the cloud-wrapped Alps. As the day wore on the light western breeze dropped and died away, and there came the stillness of a sultry August afternoon, just such an atmosphere as that of the lotus-eaters’ isle, the land where it was always afternoon.

Aunt Rhoda, who had lunched more copiously than the others, succumbed to the enervating influence of summer. The outline antimacassar on which she had been diligently stitching a design of infantine simplicity—a little girl with a watering-pot, a little boy with an umbrella—dropped from her hands. The blue lake below winked at her in the sunshine like a Titanic eye. The soft sweet breath of the pines gratified her nostrils, and that delicious sense of being gently baked through and through in Nature’s slow oven finally overcame her, and she sank into a thoroughly enjoyable slumber, a sleep in which she knew she was sleeping, and tasted all the blessedness of repose.

Daphne sat on a knoll a little way below her aunt, struggling with a sunflower, heartily tired of it all the time, and painfully oppressed by the consciousness of three hundred and fifty-one sunflowers remaining to be done after this one.

‘It is like the line of the Egyptian kings,’ she murmured with a sigh. ‘An endless procession—too stupendous for the imagination to grasp.’

Edgar, stretched at the feet of his adored, had fallen as fast asleep as Aunt Rhoda. Madoline and Gerald had wandered off to the higher grounds. They were going to the Col du Jaman for anything Daphne knew to the contrary.

This particular sunflower now approaching a finish seemed the most irritating of all his tribe. Daphne tightened her thread, pulled it into a knot, boggled at the knot, lost patience, and threw the work aside in a rage.

‘Who could do crewel-work on such a stifling day?’ she cried, looking angrily down at the lake, with its girdle of towns and villages, gardens and vineyards; looking angrily even at picturesque Chillon, with its mediæval turrets and drawbridge, angrily at the calm, snow-shrouded Dent du Midi, and the dark green hills around its base.

Then, having explored the wide landscape with eyes blind for this moment to its beauty, she looked discontentedly at the reclining form at her feet, the faithful lover, slumbering serenely, oblivious of wasps and centipedes.

‘A log,’ she muttered to herself, ‘a log. Blind and deaf! Good; yes, I know he is good, and I try to value him for his goodness; but oh, how weary I am—how weary—how weary!’

She flung aside her work, and wandered away along a narrow winding pathway, trodden by the feet of previous wanderers, upward and upward towards the granite point of the Dent du Jaman, gray against the sapphire sky. She walked, scarcely knowing where she went, or why: urged by a fever of the mind, which hurried her any whither to escape from the weariness of her own thoughts; as if such escape were possible to humanity.

She had been walking along the same serpentine path for nearly an hour, neither knowing nor caring where it might be leading her. The gray peak of the granite rock always rose yonder in the same distant patch of blue above the dark pine-trees. It seemed as if she might go on mounting this hilly path for ever and get no nearer to that lonely point.

‘It as far off as happiness or contentment,’ she said to herself; ‘vain to dream of reaching it.’

She stopped at last, and looked at her watch, feeling that the afternoon was wearing on, and that it might be time for her to hurry back to the family circle. It was past five, and the dinner hour was seven; and she had been roaming upwards by paths which might lead her astray in the descent, one woodland path being so like another. She began her homeward journey, walking quickly, her thoughtful eyes bent upon the ground. She was hurrying on, absorbed in her own thoughts, when her name was uttered by that one only voice which had power to thrill her soul.

‘Daphne!’

She looked up and saw Gerald Goring, seated on a fallen pine-trunk, smoking.

He flung away his cigarette and came towards her.

‘Good afternoon,’ she said, with a careless nod; ‘I am hurrying back to dinner.’

He put out his hand and caught her by the arm, and drew her towards him authoritatively.

‘You are not going to escape me so easily,’ he said, pale to the lips with strongest feeling. ‘No; you and I have a long reckoning to settle. What do you think I am made of, that you dare to treat me as you have done for the last month? Am I a dog to be whistled to your side, to be lured away from love and fealty to another by every trick, and grace, and charm within the compass of woman’s art, and then to be dismissed like a dog—sent back to my former owner? You think you can cure me of my folly—cure me by silence and averted looks—that I can forget you and be again the man I was before I loved you. Daphne, you should know me better than that. You have kindled a fire in my blood which you alone can quench. You have steeped me in a poison for which you have the only antidote. Oh! my Œnone! my Œnone! will you refuse the balm that can heal my wounds, the balsam that you alone can bestow?’

Daphne looked at him without flinching, the sweet girlish face deadly pale, but fixed as marble.

‘I told you what I thought and meant in my letter,’ she said quietly. ‘I have never wavered from that.’

‘Never wavered!’ he cried savagely. ‘You are made of stone. I have been trying you. I have been waiting for you to give way. I knew it must come in the end, for I know that you love me—I know it—I know it. I have known it almost ever since I came back to South Hill, and saw your cheek whiten when you recognised me; and I have been waiting to see how long this drama of self-sacrifice would last—how long you would deny your love, and falsify your whole nature. It has lasted long enough, Daphne. The chase has been severe enough. Your tender feet have been wounded by the thorny ways of self-sacrifice. Your poor Apollo’s patience is well-nigh worn out. My love, my love, why should we go on dissembling to each other, and to all the rest of the world, looking at each other with stony countenances—dumb—cold, when every throb of each burning heart beats for the other, when every feeling in each breast responds to its twin soul, as finely as a note of music to the touch of the player? Let us end it all, Daphne. Let us make an end of this long dissimulation—this life of hypocrisy. Come with me, dear; fly with me. Now, Daphne—now, this instant, before there is time for either of us to repent. We can be married to-morrow morning at Geneva—it can be easily managed in that Puritan city. Come away with me, my beloved. I will honour and respect your purity as faithfully as if a hundred knights rode at your saddle-bow. My beloved, do you think that good can come to anyone by a life-long lie, by the trampling out of Nature’s sweetest purest feeling in two loving hearts?’

He had drawn her to his breast. Folded in a lover’s arms for the first time in her life, she looked up into eyes whose passionate ardour seemed to encompass her with a divine flame: as if this man who clasped her to his breast had been indeed the old Greek god, sublime in the radiance of youth and genius and immortal beauty.

‘Daphne, will you be my wife?’

‘I cannot answer that question yet,’ she said slowly, falteringly, after a pause of some moments. ‘You must give me time. Let me go now—this instant. I must hurry back to the hotel.’

‘What! when I hold you in my arms for the first time?—when I am steeped in the rapture of a satisfied love? Oh Daphne, if you knew how often in feverish dreams I have held you thus; I have looked down into your eyes, and drunk the nectar of your lips. What?’ as she drew herself suddenly away from him; ‘even now you refuse me one kiss—the solemn pledge of our union; cruel, too cruel girl!’

‘To-morrow shall decide our fate,’ she said. ‘For pity’s sake, as you are a gentleman, let me go.’

He released her that moment. His arms dropped at his sides, and she was free.

‘There was no necessity for that appeal,’ he said coldly; ‘you can go—alone if you choose—though I should like to walk back to the hotel with you. I left—your sister’ (it seemed as if it were difficult for him to pronounce Lina’s name) ‘in the garden before I strolled up here. I thought you were with your devoted lover. You say to-morrow shall decide our fate. I cannot imagine why you should hesitate, or postpone your decision. I know that you love me as fondly as I love you, and that neither of us can ever care for anyone else. Promise me at least one thing before we part to-day. Promise me that you will break off this pitiful mockery of an engagement to a man whom you despise.’

‘I do not despise him—that is too hard a word—but I promise that I will never be Edgar Turchill’s wife.’

‘Lose no time in letting him know that. My blood boils and my heart sickens every time I see him touch your hand. Thank God, he keeps his kisses for your hours of privacy.’

‘He has never kissed me but once in my life,’ said Daphne, tossing up her head, and blushing angrily.

‘Thank God again.’

‘Good-bye,’ she said, looking at him with a pathetic tenderness, love struggling with despair.

He leaned against the brown trunk of a fir-tree, pale to the lips, his eyes fixed on the ground, where the mosses and starry white blossoms, and tremulous harebells, and delicate maidenhair fern shone like jewels in the golden patches of light which flickered with every movement of the dark branches above them. His eyes perused every leaf and every petal, noting their form and colour with mechanical accuracy of observation. His pencil could have reproduced every detail of that little bit of broken ground six months afterwards.

‘Daphne,’ he said huskily, ‘you are very cruel to me. I am not going to let you see how low a man can sink when he loves a woman as weakly, as blindly, as madly as I love you. I am not going to show you how base he can be—how sunk in his own esteem. There is some remnant of pride left in me. I am not going to crawl at your feet, or to shed womanish tears. But I tell you all the same, you are breaking my heart.’

‘It is all foolishness,’ said Daphne, pale, but calm of speech and eye, every nerve braced in the intensity of her resolution. ‘It is folly and madness from beginning to end. You confessed as much just this moment. Why should I sacrifice my honour and my self-respect to gratify a weak, blind, mad love? I love my sister with a truer, better, holier affection than I could ever feel for you—if I had been your wife five-and-twenty years, and it were our silver wedding-day.’

She smiled even in her despair at the impossible image of herself and Gerald Goring grown middle-aged and stout and commonplace, like the principal figures in a silver wedding.

‘Why cannot you let the past be past—forget that you ever have been so foolish, so false, as to care for me?’

‘Forget! yes, if I could do that. It would be as easy to pluck my heart out of my body and go on living comfortably afterwards. No, Daphne, I can never forget. No, Daphne, I can never go back to the old calm tranquil love. It never was love. It was friendship, affection, respect—what you will, but not love. I never knew what love meant till I knew you.’

‘Good-bye,’ she said gently, perceiving that an argument of this kind might go on for ever.

It was sweet to hear him plead; there was even a fearful kind of happiness—half sweet, half bitter—in being alone with him in that silent wood, in knowing that he was her own; heart, mind, and soul devoted to her; ready to sacrifice honour and good name for her sake: for what would the world say of him if he jilted Madoline and ran away with Madoline’s sister? Her breast swelled with ineffable pride at the thought of her triumph over this man to whom her girlish heart had given itself unwittingly, on just such a summer afternoon as this, two years ago. The man who had so often seemed to scorn her, to regard her only as a subject for friendly ridicule, in the beginning of things at South Hill. He was at her feet; she had made him her slave. Her heart thrilled with delight at the knowledge of his love; yet above every selfish consideration was her thought of her sister, and that made her firm as the granite peak of Jaman yonder, rising sharply above its black girdle of firs.

She looked at him for a few moments steadily, with a curious smile, a smile which lighted up the expressive face with an almost inspired look. Her hand rested lightly on the lace at her throat, the finger-tips just touching the pearl necklace, Lina’a new year’s gift, which she wore constantly. It was her talisman.

‘Let us shake hands,’ she said, ‘and part friends.’

‘Friends!’ he echoed scornfully, ‘am I ever anything else than your friend? I am your slave. The greater includes the less.’

He clasped her hand in both of his, lifted it to his lips, and then let her go without a word.

The smile faded from her face as she turned from him. She went slowly down the hill by the winding path. Gerald took a hasty survey of the scene, and then struck downwards by a descent that seemed almost perpendicular.